Research / Clinical Summary

Wael Al-Delaimy, MD, PhD Associate Professor & Chief, Div of Global Health, Family & Preventive Medicine Cancer Prevention & Control Program Contact by Email

Dr. Al-Delaimy is a multidisciplinary epidemiologist who has been involved with several large cohorts including the European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Diet (EPIC), the Nurses' Health Study (NHS), the Nurses Health Study II (NHSII), the Health Professionals Follow Up Study (HPFS), and the Rancho Bernardo Study (RBS), and the Women's Healthy Eating and Living Study (WHEL), which is a randomized dietary clinical trial.

He tries to link the population-based field work with the laboratory advancements of using more accurate and cost-effective assays for large populations. He is internationally recognized in the area of tobacco exposure biomarkers and pioneered the toenail nicotine biomarker to achieve this purpose in relation to lung cancer in the HPFS, one of the larger and more established cohorts in the country. He is also involved in research on hormones and diet in relation to cancer outcomes in WHEL and RBS.

At the population level, he is the principal investigator and director of the California Tobacco Surveys, which is a multi-million dollar State-wide representative survey of Californians on smoking related attitudes and behavior that has been ongoing since 1990 and recruits more than 25,000 study participants every 3 years.

Future directions in cancer research for Al-Delaimy will be in utilizing existing exposure and disease biomarkers and developing new ones that will be of relevance to cancer epidemiology prevention and control and applicable in developed as well as developing countries.

He is also interested, through his work with the California Department of Health Services and the California Tobacco Surveys, to support health policy changes that would further advance tobacco control within the United States and internationally. As Chief of the Division of Global Health he is organizing research, teaching and training on chronic disease prevention in less developed countries.